Tuesday, April 06, 2010

I Smell Bullshit

I do. If I am wrong--if, for instance, charges are laid--than Mr. Bergamini will get a patented BCLSB apology, and I will issue a patented BCLSB denunciation of the attackers. I haven't done one of those in a while. It'd be fun. Until then, I am smelling bullshit. This is from a facebook page via a website run by the guys that "outed" Ellen Ocran. So their view of things seems a bit feverish.

35 comments:

Oh! Oh! they made a complaint! If this is not true, the police will be very unamused. Keep watching this. Reminds me of a similar "incident: at York U years ago - the prof who made claims of being beaten up ended up charged with mischief. I look forward to the investigation.

Anyway, this certainly has sent the juices flowing into the nether regions of the wingnuts who, despite having no more information than the rest of us, are already calling for the mass deportation of all Arab-Canadians.

Lots of irony here. Broadly speaking the partisans who cried massacre in Jenin and who believed without evidence that Israel targets Arabs to harvest their organs are skeptical of this sort of claim and in this case require evidence. Had Ann Coulter not been shouted down in the city where this may well have occurred she might have added that the same crowd believed the allegations against the Duke lacrosse players even though they were patently false.

I don't know what happened here objectively. I hope we find out. But the difference in how people approach these things is noteworthy.

Imagine being threatened by a "Machete-wielding" maniac and the first thing you think of doing is running home and putting it on Facebook??!!

Police? Well an afterthought.

Look if this happened then its mindblowing but something just doesn't sit well with me. And if you can stomach it take a look at the usual loony right wankers led by Newman himself (Levant). He attacks some poor shmuck at the CJC for simply giving a pretty sobering comment. And of course Ezra being the bully he is cannot just stop at being critical nooooo he has to poke fun at this guy's supposed disability.

I took a shower after reading Ezra. God I hope whoever is suing him wins bigtime!!

If this happened as described, then the guy with the machete should be charged with something very serious. But there are some things about the story that give me pause. At the very least, it has to be noted that any story that starts "Around 1:45am, as we were leaving the bar…" suggested that there was alcohol involved and that it was dark.

"People who were around the scene said the blade came within inches of my neck."

...suggests witnesses beyond the two, which means this really shouldn't be too hard to solve. Although the newspaper accounts don't mention anyone but the two and the gang of machete wielding arabs. Also, the two went back to the bar and you would think there would be people there willing to say that, yes, I saw the guy and he was injured. (Injury happened in 1st part of incident).

And yes, if there are people in Ottawa willing to attack Israel supporters with machetes they should be charged and put away.

"...Klibanov, 20, said the machete missed the back of his friend’s head by about a foot as they sprinted across the bridge to Ottawa. He said they were not injured because they outran their assailants..."

wv = aduckena as in "they were aduckena!"http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Machete+used+anti+Semitic+attack+Gatineau+Carleton+students/2766537/story.html

To add another weird detail: "we heard the shout of 'Zionist' in Arabic" … "All of a sudden we were surrounded by 10-15 men who began to shout at us in Arabic". How did he know the language was Arabic?

I trust that all the skeptics would be equally skeptical of a claim by a black woman that she was raped by a white man. I assume they would draw no conclusions unless and until a conviction was recorded and all appeals exhausted.

I ran, and as I looked back, I saw the long shiny blade slicing through the air about 12 inches from my neck. I ran as fast I could and, thanks to my grade 9 track and field training, got away. People who were around the scene said the blade came within inches of my neck.

It's hard to run at full flight while looking backward. Apparently the assailant was also running. But if he's running (which requires pumping of the arms), how does he manage to get the knife within 12 inches (Bergamini's estimate) or 'inches' (as estimated by "people who were around the scene").

But who are these people and when did Mr. Bergamini talk to them? Did he run away only to return? But why would they be still there? (It is now, after all, 2:30 am.)

I ran as fast I could and, thanks to my grade 9 track and field training, got away.

The addition of this detail to the narrative is also a little, how shall we say, dramatic?

If it were anyone else except this Wunderkind of Conservative activism and political entrepreneurship, I wouldn't be nearly as skeptical. But these people have completely shredded any right to be accorded the benefit of the doubt.

By the way, unlike the rest, I won't be apologising for or denouncing anything once the story comes to its conclusion. It should go without saying that an attack like this is intolerable.

Mark, could be because according to some simulations Oswald would have had an open view of the president at this point. Anyway, there's fingerprints, fiber, and apparent bullet analysis, odd behaviour (like shooting a police officer soon after the assassination) that pins the crime on Oswald.... far more evidence than Bergamini's case has so far. Hey, apparently he said some of the faces seemed familiar so there should be some break soon.

If we're going to go running over to left-field... how about Rachel Maddow's the Acorn tapes.

My point is that people don't want to believe that the complainant's story is true any more than the OJ jury wanted to believe the incontrovertible evidence in front of it. Which isn't to say that the guy has proven a case against his attackers here--but by the same token the claims that he in essence is a liar haven't remotely been proven either. Rather, those claims seem to me to betray an agenda where Zionists must always be oppressors and never victims. This is a case of battling agendas: it's those who want to show that things like IAW lead deranged Arabs to commit assaults vs. those who are so attached to the Zionism is Racism mantra that they would rather call a possiblevictim a liar than give the guy the benefit of the doubt pending an investigation.

And if it is true that the CBC wouldn't interview him without also hearing from someone from the "other side," it should be defunded and disbanded immediately.

Because if you kept it in the back seat you might hit the brakes and cut something off you didn't want to lose.

When faced with a scimitar like those wielded by some villains in the Indiana Jones movies, there are two correct responses: a) yank out your revolver and shoot him; b) finding you have lost your revolver, run!

In the case of b) it helps if you took track in grade nine instead of playing Dungeons and Dragons.

OK, so the facebook account has 10to 15 men yelling in Arabic. Then later a car with three men yelling in English comes along, one saying he had hit Bergamini, then it's open the trunk, haul out the machete and run.

The Ottawa citizen version has 10 men yelling in Arabic and English.

So was the story migrating to sound more plausible or being clarified?

The blog with the facebook account also has a post with the interview with Coren. Bergamini says there were witnesses of the machete incident and he has their contact information. Says Klibanov has been on a kibbutz, I think, and so Klibanov told Bergamini they were saying 'Zionist' in Arabic. Says one of them is a student he has seen around but doesn't know his name.